1.
Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation

2.
Taung Child
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The Taung Child is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal Nature in 1925. The Taung skull is in repository at the University of Witwatersrand, dean Falk, a specialist in brain evolution, has called it the most important anthropological fossil of the twentieth century. In the early 20th century, the workers at quarries in southern Africa routinely uncovered fossils from the tufa formations they mined. Many were of extinct fauna, which included baboons and other primates, the director gave it to his son, Pat Izod, who displayed it on the mantle over the fireplace. Josephine Salmons was the first female student of Dart, an anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand, Salmons was permitted to take the fossilised skull and presented it to Dart, who also recognised it as a significant find. Dart asked the company to any more interesting fossilised skulls that should be unearthed. Young sent some of the back to Dart. The paper appeared in the 7 February 1925 issue of the journal Nature, the fossil was soon nicknamed the Taung Child. Scientists were initially reluctant to accept that the Taung Child and the new genus Australopithecus were ancestral to modern humans, in the issue of Nature immediately following the one in which Darts paper was published, several authorities in British paleoanthropology criticized Darts conclusion. Grafton Elliot Smith stated that he needed more evidence – and a picture of the skull – before he could judge the significance of the new fossil. Arthur Smith Woodward dismissed the Taung Child as having little bearing on the issue of whether the ancestors of man are to be sought in Asia or Africa. These critiques became more fervent a few months later, will satisfy geologists that this claim is preposterous. There were several reasons why it took decades for the field to accept Darts claim that Australopithecus africanus was in the line of descent. For one, the British scientific establishment was at the time enamored with the hoax Piltdown Man, expecting human ancestors to have evolved a large brain very early, they found that the Taung Childs small brain and human-like teeth made it an unlikely ancestor to modern humans. Until the 1940s, most anthropologists also believed that humans had evolved in Asia, and despite accepting that modern humans had emerged through evolution, a large number of anthropologists believed that the genus Homo had split from the great apes as much as 30 million years ago. They therefore felt uneasy about accepting that humans had had a small-brained, solly Zuckerman, who had studied anatomy under Raymond Dart in South Africa, concluded as early as 1928 that Australopithecus was little more than an ape. He and a team carried out further studies of the Australopithecine family in the 1940s and 1950s

3.
Edward Sapir
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Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, his parents emigrated to United States of America when he was a child and he studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph. D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, by the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale, where he never really fit in. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, with his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other and this part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas and he played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages and he was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages. He proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated and he specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute. Later in his career he worked with Yiddish, Hebrew, and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages. Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir, the family was not Orthodox, and his father maintained his ties to Judaism through its music. The Sapir family did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as a nationality, Edward Sapirs first language was Yiddish, and later English. In 1888, when he was four years old, the moved to Liverpool, England. Here Edward Sapir lost his younger brother Max to typhoid fever and his father had difficulty keeping a job in a synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side, where the family lived in poverty. As Jacob Sapir could not provide for his family, Sapirs mother, Eva Seagal Sapir, even though Eva Sapir was an important influence, Sapir received his lust for knowledge and interest in scholarship, aesthetics, and music from his father. At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, and saving the scholarship money for his college education. Through the scholarship Sapir supplemented his mothers meager earnings, Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship

4.
Margaret Mead
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Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelors degree at Barnard College in New York City and her M. A. Mead was a respected and often controversial academic who popularized the insights of anthropology in modern American and Western culture. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution and she was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional Western religious life. Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia and her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine died at the age of nine months and this was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently, so her early education was directed by her Grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska and her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith that she had been acquainted with. In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking, Margaret studied one year,1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she earned her bachelors degree in 1923. She studied with professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict at Columbia University before earning her masters degree in 1924, Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa. In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City and she received her Ph. D. from Columbia University in 1929. Before departing for Samoa, Mead had an affair with the linguist Edward Sapir. But Sapirs conservative ideas about marriage and the role were anathema to Mead. Mead received news of Sapirs remarriage while living in Samoa, where, on a beach and her first husband was American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time who eventually became an anthropologist. Mead dismissively characterized their union as my student marriage in Blackberry Winter and her second husband was New Zealander Reo Fortune, a Cambridge graduate and fellow anthropologist. Meads third and longest-lasting marriage was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson and she readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her, and she remained his friend ever after, keeping his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled. Mead also had a close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughters Eye, Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual

5.
Clifford Geertz
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He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Geertz was born in San Francisco on August 23,1926, after service in the US Navy in World War II, Geertz received his B. A. in philosophy from Antioch College in 1950. After graduating from Antioch he attended Harvard University from which he graduated in 1956 and this interdisciplinary program was led by Talcott Parsons, and Geertz worked with both Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn. Geertz was trained as an anthropologist, and conducted his first long-term fieldwork, together with his wife, Hildred, in Java and he studied the religious life of a small, upcountry town for 2.5 years, living with a railroad labourers family. After finishing his thesis, Geertz returned to Bali and Sumatra and he earned his Ph. D. in 1956 with a dissertation entitled Religion in Modjukuto, A Study of Ritual Belief In A Complex Society. He taught or held fellowships at a number of schools before joining the faculty of the department at the University of Chicago in 1960. In this period Geertz expanded his focus on Indonesia to include both Java and Bali and produced three books, including Religion of Java, Agricultural Involution, and Peddlers and Princes. In the mid-1960s, he shifted course and began a new project in Morocco that resulted in several publications, including Islam Observed. In 1970, Geertz left Chicago to become professor of science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1970 to 2000. In 1973, he published The Interpretation of Cultures, which collected essays Geertz had published throughout the 1960s and that became Geertzs best-known book and established him not just as an Indonesianist but also as an anthropological theorist. In 1974, he edited the anthology Myth, Symbol, Culture that contained papers by many important anthropologists on symbolic anthropology, Geertz produced ethnographic pieces in this period, such as Kinship in Bali, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society and Negara. From the 1980s to his death, Geertz wrote more theoretical and essayistic pieces, as a result, most of his books of the period are collections of essays, including Local Knowledge, Available Light and Life Among The Anthros. He also produced the autobiographical After The Fact and Works and Lives, Geertz received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from some fifteen colleges and universities, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge. He was married first to the anthropologist Hildred Geertz, after their divorce, he married Karen Blu, also an anthropologist. Clifford Geertz died of complications following heart surgery on October 30,2006, Geertz conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. This fieldwork was the basis of Geertzs famous analysis of the Balinese cockfight among others and he was the director of the multidisciplinary project Committee for the Comparative Studies of New Nations while he held a position in Chicago in the 1960s. He conducted fieldwork in Morocco as part of project on bazaars, mosques, olive growing. The ethnographic data for the essay on Thick description was collected here

6.
Noam Chomsky
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky is also a figure in analytic philosophy. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard Universitys Society of Fellows and he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a role in the decline of behaviorism. Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism, while expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, however, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech—including for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror. One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced an array of academic fields. Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7,1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his father was William Zev Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had fled to the United States in 1913. Chomskys mother was the Belarusian-born Elsie Simonofsky, a teacher and activist whom William had met while working at Mikveh Israel, Noam was the Chomsky familys first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was five years later. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive, as a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as an accident, because it allowed him to become critical of other far-left ideologies, namely Stalinism. Chomskys primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here, at age 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, from the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics

7.
W. H. R. Rivers
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Riverss most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he remained close friends until his own sudden death. Rivers was a fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge, and is notable for his participation in the Torres Straits expedition of 1898. Rivers was born in 1864 at Constitution Hill, Chatham, Kent, son of Elizabeth Hunt, midshipman Rivers, who claimed to be the man who shot the man who fatally wounded Lord Nelson proved himself to be a model of heroism in the Battle of Trafalgar. In the course of his duties, the seventeen-year-old midshipmans foot was almost completely blown off by a grenade, Rivers asked first for his shoes, then told the gunners mate to look after the guns and informed Captain Hardy that he was going down to the cockpit. The leg was then sawn off, without anaesthetic, four inches below the knee, according to legend, he did not cry out once during the amputation nor during the consequent sealing of the wound with hot tar. N. Then stationed at Deptford, Henry Rivers followed many family traditions in being educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Hunts, like the Riverses, were an established naval and Church of England family. One of those destined for the pulpit was Thomas, but some quirk of originality set him off into an unusual career and he built up a good practice as a speech therapist and was patronised by Sir John Forbes MD FRS, who sent him pupils for twenty four years. However, after just an instruction from Hunt he spoke easily. Hunt died in 1851, survived by his wife Mary and their two children and his practice was then passed on to his son, James. James Hunt was an exuberant character, giving to each of his ventures his boundless energy, taking up his fathers legacy with great zeal, by the age of 21 Hunt had published his compendious work, Stammering and Stuttering, Their Nature and Treatment. This went into six editions during his lifetime and was reprinted again in 1870, just after his death, in 1856, Hunt had joined the Ethnological Society of London and by 1859 he was its joint secretary. He was not, however, a man within the society as many of the members disliked his attacks on religious and humanitarian agencies represented by missionaries. As a result of the antagonism, Hunt founded the Anthropological Society and became its president and it was mainly to do with Hunts efforts that the British Association for the Advancement of Science accepted anthropology in 1866. Even by Victorian standards, Hunt was a decided racist and his paper On a Negros Place in Nature, delivered before the BAAS in 1863, was met with hisses and catcalls. What Hunt saw as a statement of the facts was in fact a defence of the subjection and slavery of African-Americans. In addition to his extremist views, Hunt also led his society to incur heavy debts, the controversies surrounding his conduct told on his health and, on 29 August 1869, Hunt died of inflammation of the brain leaving a widow, Henrietta Maria, and five children. Hunts speech therapy practice was passed onto Hunts brother-in-law, Henry Rivers, with the practice came many of Hunts established patients, most notably The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson who had been a regular visitor to Ore House. To his nephew William, Hunt had left his books though a young Rivers had refused them, William Halse Rivers Rivers was the oldest of four children, with his siblings being brother Charles Hay and sisters Ethel Marian and Katharine Elizabeth

8.
History of anthropology
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History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has meant the study of man. The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically, at present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France. The term anthropology ostensibly is a compound of Greek ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos, human being. The compound, however, is unknown in ancient Greek or Latin and it first appears sporadically in the scholarly Latin anthropologia of Renaissance France, where it spawns the French word anthropologie, transferred into English as anthropology. It does belong to a class of words produced with the suffix, such as archeo-logy, bio-logy, etc. “the study of. ”The mixed character of Greek anthropos. There is no independent noun, logia, however, of meaning in classical Greek. The word λόγος has that meaning, James Hunt attempted to rescue the etymology in his first address to the Anthropological Society of London as president and founder,1863. He did find an anthropologos from Aristotle in the standard ancient Greek Lexicon, which he defines the word as “speaking or treating of man. ”This view is entirely wishful thinking, as Liddell and Scott go on to explain the meaning, “i. e. fond of personal conversation. ”If Aristotle. The lack of any ancient denotation of anthropology, however, is not an etymological problem, Liddell and Scott list 170 Greek compounds ending in –logia, enough to justify its later use as a productive suffix. The ancient Greeks often used suffixes in forming compounds that had no independent variant, the etymological dictionaries are united in attributing –logia to logos, from legein, “to collect. ”The thing collected is primarily ideas, especially in speech. The American Heritage Dictionary says, “ derivatives independently built to logos, marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology, begins The Rise of Anthropological Theory with the statement that anthropology is “the science of history. Just as natural history comprises the characteristics of organisms past and present, so cultural or social history comprises the characteristics of society past and it includes both documented history and prehistory, but its slant is toward institutional development rather than particular non-repeatable historical events. According to Harris, the 19th-century anthropologists were theorizing under the presumption that the development of society followed some sort of laws and he decries the loss of that view in the 20th century by the denial that any laws are discernable or that current institutions have any bearing on ancient. He coins the term ideographic for them, the 19th-century views, on the other hand, are nomothetic, that is, they provide laws. He intends “to reassert the methodological priority of the search for the laws of history in the science of man. ”He is looking for “a general theory of history. ”The use of “tends to” implies some degree of freedom to happen or not happen, but in strict determinism, given certain causes, the result and only that result must occur. Different philosophers, however, use determinism in different senses. ”Institutions are not a physical reality, when they act in society, they do so according to the laws of history, of which they are not aware, hence, there is no historical element of free will

9.
Coming of Age in Samoa
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Coming of Age in Samoa is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Tau in the Samoan Islands. First published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher, since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnons Yanomamö, The Fierce People overtook it. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. It is a key text in the nature and nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes. Although Meads work has been very influential some of her most significant claims about Samoan culture have been criticized and contradicted by subsequent research and it is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating and she discusses various limitations in each approach and then introduces the new field of anthropology as a promising alternative science based on analyzing social structures and dynamics. For this reason her methodology is one of studying societies in their natural environment, once she has an understanding of Samoan culture she will delve into the specifics of how adolescent education and socialization are carried out in Samoan culture and contrast it with western culture. Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture, to answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group of Samoans. Mead studied daily living, education, social structures and dynamics, rituals, etiquette, Mead begins with the description of a typical idyllic day in Samoa. Then she describes child education starting with the birth of children which is celebrated with a ritual feast. After birth however, Mead describes how children are ignored, for girl children sometimes explicitly ritually ignored. She describes the methods of disciplining children. Most involve some sort of punishment such as hitting with hands, palm fronds. However, the punishment is mostly ritualistic and not meant to inflict serious harm, children are expected to contribute meaningful work from a very early age. Initially, young children of both sexes help to care for infants, as the children grow older, however, the education of the boys shifts to fishing while the girls focus more on child care. However, the concept of age for the Samoans is not the same as the west and they dont keep track of birth days and they judge maturity not on actual number of years alive but on the outward physical changes in the child. As a child gets bigger and stronger he or she gets more work, male adolescents undergo various kinds of both encouragement and punishment to make them competitive and aggressive. For the males there are different possible jobs in the community

10.
Nanook of the North
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In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. The film has been considered the first feature-length documentary. Some have criticized Flaherty for staging several sequences, but the film is viewed as standing alone in its stark regard for the courage. The documentary follows the lives of an Inuk, Nanook, and his family as they travel, search for food, Nanook, his wife, Nyla, and their family are introduced as fearless heroes who endure rigors no other race could survive. The audience sees Nanook, often with his family, hunt a walrus, build an igloo, go about his day, in 1910 Flaherty was hired as an explorer and prospector along the Hudson Bay for the Canadian Pacific Railway. By 1916, Flaherty had enough footage that he began test screenings and was met with wide enthusiasm, however, in 1916, Flaherty dropped a cigarette onto the original camera negative and lost 30,000 feet of film. With his first attempt ruined, Flaherty decided to not only return for new footage, spending four years raising money, Flaherty was eventually funded by French fur company Revillon Frères and returned to the North and shot from August 1920 to August 1921. As a main character, Flaherty chose the celebrated hunter of the Itivimuit tribe, the full collaboration of the Inuit was key to Flahertys success as the Inuit were his film crew and many of them knew his camera better than he did. Flaherty has been criticized for deceptively portraying staged events as reality, Nanook was in fact named Allakariallak, while the wife shown in the film was not really his wife. According to Charles Nayoumealuk, who was interviewed in Nanook Revisited, on the other hand, while Flaherty made his Inuit actors use spears instead of guns during the walrus and seal hunts, the prey shown in the film were genuine, wild animals. The building of the igloo is one of the most celebrated sequences in the film, building an igloo large enough for a camera to enter resulted in the dome collapsing, and when they finally succeeded in making the igloo it was too dark for photography. In the Trade Post of the White Man scene, Nanook and his family arrive in a kayak at the trading post and one family member after another emerge from a small kayak, akin to a clown car at the circus. Going to trade his hunt from the year, including the skins of foxes, seals, the trader plays music on a gramophone and tries to explain how a man cans his voice. Bending forward and staring at the machine, Nanook puts his ear closer as the trader cranks the mechanism again, the trader removes the record and hands it to Nanook who at first peers at it and then puts it in his mouth and bites it. The scene is meant to be a one as the audience laughs at the naivete of Nanook. In truth, the scene was scripted and Allakariallak knew what a gramophone was. The film is not technically sophisticated, how could it be, with one camera, no lights, freezing cold, but it has an authenticity that prevails over any complaints that some of the sequences were staged. If you stage a walrus hunt, it still involves hunting a walrus, what shines through is the humanity and optimism of the Inuit

11.
Ernest Gellner
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His first book, Words and Things, prompted a leader in The Times and a month-long correspondence on its letters page over his attack on linguistic philosophy. He is considered one of the leading theoreticians on the issue of nationalism, Gellner was born in Paris to Anna, née Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urban intellectual German-speaking Jewish couple from Bohemia. He was brought up in Prague, attending a Czech language primary school before entering the English-language grammar school and this was Franz Kafkas tricultural Prague, antisemitic but stunningly beautiful, a city he later spent years longing for. In 1939, when Gellner was 13, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany persuaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move to St Albans, just north of London, at Balliol, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics and specialised in philosophy. During this period, Prague lost its hold over him, foreseeing the communist takeover. So all the bastards, all the distinctive personalities, rapidly went into the Party. So what was coming was totally clear to me, and it cured me of the emotional hold which Prague had previously had over me, I could foresee that a Stalinoid dictatorship was due, it came in 48. The precise date I couldnt foresee, but that it was due to come was absolutely obvious for various reasons, I wanted no part of it and got out as quickly as I could and forgot about it. He returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning the John Locke prize, the same year, he began his academic career at the University of Edinburgh as an assistant to Professor John Macmurray in the Department of Moral Philosophy. He moved to the London School of Economics in 1949, joining the department under Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg admired philosophy and believed that philosophy and sociology were very close to each other and he employed me because I was a philosopher. It took him time to discover that I wasnt. Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse had preceded Ginsberg as Martin White Professor of Sociology at the LSE, Ginsberg. was totally unoriginal and lacked any sharpness. And so Ginsberg extrapolated this, and on his view the whole of humanity moved to ever greater rationality, from drunk Polish peasant to T. L. Hobhouse and a Hampstead garden. Gellners critique of linguistic philosophy in Words and Things focused on J. L. Austin, the book brought Gellner critical acclaim. He obtained his Ph. D. in 1961 with a thesis on Organization, Thought and Change was published in 1965, and in State and Society in Soviet Thought, he examined whether Marxist regimes could be liberalized. He was elected to the British Academy in 1974 and his Plough, Sword and Book investigated the philosophy of history, and Conditions of Liberty sought to explain the collapse of socialism. On 5 November 1995, after returning from a conference in Budapest, he suffered an attack and died at his flat in Prague

12.
Frantz Fanon
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In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of Independence from France, and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He wrote numerous books, including, most notably, The Wretched of the Earth and this focuses on the necessary role Fanon thinks violence must play in decolonization struggles. Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French département and his father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians and worked as a customs agent. His mother, Eléanore Médélice, was of black Martinician and white Alsatian descent, Fanon was the youngest of four sons in a family of eight children, two of whom died in childhood. They could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, then the most prestigious school in Martinique. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval troops were blockaded on Martinique, forced to remain on the island, French sailors took over the government from the Martiniquan people and established a collaborationist Vichy regime. In the face of economic distress and isolation under the blockade, they instituted a regime, Fanon described them as taking off their masks. Residents made many complaints of harassment and sexual misconduct by the sailors, the abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French Navy influenced Fanon, reinforcing his feelings of alienation and his disgust with colonial racism. At the age of seventeen, Fanon fled the island as a dissident and he enlisted in the Free French army and joined an Allied convoy that reached Casablanca. He was later transferred to a base at Béjaïa on the Kabylie coast of Algeria. Fanon left Algeria from Oran and served in France, notably in the battles of Alsace, in 1944 he was wounded at Colmar and received the Croix de guerre. When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany along with photo journalists, Fanon and his fellow Afro-Caribbean soldiers were sent to Toulon. Later, they were transferred to Normandy to await repatriation, during the war, Fanon was exposed to severe European anti-black racism. For example, white women liberated by black soldiers often preferred to dance with fascist Italian prisoners, in 1945, Fanon returned to Martinique. He lasted a time there. He worked for the campaign of his friend and mentor Aimé Césaire. Césaire ran on the communist ticket as a delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. Fanon stayed long enough to complete his baccalaureate and then went to France, Fanon was educated in Lyon, where he also studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Pontys lectures